Deep Thoughts...by Mike Tyson??

"You look at old pictures and then you look in the mirror and you don't even know who that person is."

Maybe its that I'm home now, but Iron Mike really touched a nerve there. It makes you wonder how people like Mike Tyson and Michael Jackson go on. Its sad to watch people who have been destroyed by society and the roles society puts them flounder about pathetically. WE hook them on the spotlight, WE give them all that love and attention...and then WE just turn the faucet off. WE reward them for their eccentricities, even love them for it, and then inevitably they take it one step too far and suddenly it gets all weird. Its cruel. Does anyone really expect these people to be normal? I'm waiting for the day when 5-minute-of-fame victims actually outnumber straight society. That's going to a be a shitstorm of misfunction.

I'll admit- free choice exists and the two people I mentioned above are a rapist and a child molester respectively....BUT there's a broader point. I think it comes down to how we want to treat our fallen greek heroes- are we happier to see them blinded wandering the countryside forever serving as a reminder of man's folly OR are we at a point as a society where we can say, "thank you Oedipus, we learned a lot from you, we don't need to see you suffer any more."

Anyone who's seen Jake the Snake Roberts in Beyond the Mat (a truly excellent documentary) knows what I'm talking about. As a side note, how fucking weird is it that Jake the Snake decided to use "dirty truck stop bathroom" as the motif for his website??

I'm re-reading this now, and I just want to say that I'm not at all advocating that all of fame's misfits need to find chocolate chip cookies and santa claus like Robert Downey Junior. Where have you gone buddy? What happened to the man who danced naked in a Wall Street water fountain in The Last Party (another GREAT movie, thank you NYUTV for turning me on to that).

I'm just saying, as much as the world needs pathetic washed up celebrities, sometimes it gets a bit too cruel... even for me. I mean, lets beat the crap out of Don King for 15 years and see what happens to him.